


Back In NYC

by HarveyWallbanger



Series: You're Part of the Life I've Never Had [3]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Autopsy, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Gore, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 05:19:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15767409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: Nights like these appeal to me.





	1. Fools and Ghouls

**Author's Note:**

> I marked this story 'mature' not for sexual content, of which there is really none, but for the detailed description of autopsy and embalming procedure. If you think this content will bother you, Dear Reader, please don't read this story.  
> It's a series! The title of which comes from a line in the Chemical Brothers' song, Setting Sun. The title of this story is the name of a Genesis song, though I am only familiar with the cover version, by Jeff Buckley. The quote in the summary comes from a line in Iggy Pop's Run Like A Villain, and the title of the first chapter is a snippet from the Revolting Cocks' Beers, Steers and Queers.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. This story and the work it's based on are fiction. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

The price for eternity is revelation. You know that, now.  
Crane will embalm the body of Bruce Wayne’s clone, but only if he’s allowed to do a full autopsy.  
“Why?” you ask, though the answer is obvious. You’re disappointed that you didn’t think to suggest it, yourself. That you didn’t immediately say that you would observe. That you’re asking Crane why. Every moment that you don’t remember yourself, your own curiosity, your disappointment with yourself spreads outward like a stain. It’s a liquid, soaking into the fabric of your self, and if you don’t wash it out quickly, it will dry and set, and then you will be lost.  
Crane turns away for a moment, a strange gesture that seems more like an actor’s flourish than a show of contrition. He turns back, his body moving like a puppet, like an automaton. “It’s a professional exchange. When I was in Arkham, Hugo Strange plundered my father’s laboratory. What he couldn’t learn from the materials he stole, he extracted.” Crane holds a gloved hand up to his swaddled head, and makes a screwing gesture with one finger. “This thing came from Indian Hill, did it not?”  
Your jaw tightens, and you breathe in a long, full breath through your nose. “Yes. That’s where he was made.”  
“Tit for tat,” says Crane. His eyes glitter.  
“I want to be there when you do it,” you say. Saying it now, though, does nothing to halt the trickle of- what is that- is that shame?  
Disgusting.  
“Of course you do,” Crane says, “Your brother wasn’t interested in anything. You’re a breath of fresh air.”  
“Jerome wasn’t good for much.”  
“You wouldn’t be here without him, though,” Crane says, already turning away, utterly unbothered by the prospect of the anger he might arouse and what you might do with it. It’s then that you realize that Crane is only by a minor degree a higher form of life than Jerome was. You’re getting tired of the freaks. It’s an old feeling of fatigue that you don’t want to investigate, or even register. When this is over, it’ll be over, and you’ll find a way to get information about Mr. Freeze. What you already know is that if he works for Cobblepot, it’s because Cobblepot gives him the resources he needs. That, at least, is recognizable, logical. You can’t trust a person who doesn’t have logical motives. Emotion fouls everything it touches. You’ll get access to the things Freeze wants, and then, you’ll be done with Crane, done with his staring eyes and his robotic voice and his ticking movements and his stupid affectations and his idiotic friend. As if on cue, Jervis Tetch appears, hatless indoors, but wearing what looks like a cross between a bathrobe and an overcoat on top of his clothing.  
“What’s this I see- we have company. Jonathan, you should have told me; I would have prepared refreshments.”  
“He’s just leaving,” Crane says, looking not at you but at Tetch.  
“No, no,” says Tetch, “you must stay. We’ve the whole day to while away.”  
You know enough to not look into his eyes. Is that a clock you hear, in the distance? You’ve got to get out of this absurd little sideshow. “That sounds very amusing,” you say, “but I have business to attend to. Elsewhere.”  
“Yes,” Crane says, still looking at Tetch, who is now looking at Crane, neither of them looking at you, “he has to bring me the body.”  
“Body?” Tetch says, raising his eyebrows, “My, my. Now, what sinister business could Mr. Valeska be up to?”  
“It’s Bruce Wayne’s clone,” says Crane. As much as you suddenly want to strike him, you’re just as suddenly filled with intense, visceral revulsion at the thought of touching the burlap skin. It’s laughable, but you’re not entirely sure that there’s flesh underneath it.  
“Will wonders never cease to amaze?” says Tetch. Flesh and blood though he is, you can’t hit Tetch, either.  
“Your friend can fill you in if he wants to,” you say, looking at the tip of Tetch’s left ear, “I have to go.”  
“Don’t tarry too long,” Crane says, “It won’t keep forever.”  
As though it were not enough, this is when Ecco chooses to return. The least she can do is help you with the body. You don’t ask where she’s been or what she’s been doing, but silently lead her into your bedroom. Before you left, you wrapped the body in the bedsheet. You hate yourself for the shock you feel when you see it again.  
“I wondered about that,” Ecco says, “but I didn’t want to pry. Who is it that you didn’t just drag it into an alley?”  
You pull back the part of the sheet covering his face.  
“I guess it didn’t work out between you two.”  
“It’s not him.” Your voice is a low, slow creak.  
“It sure looks like Bruce Wayne.”  
“It’s a clone. They made him in Indian Hill, to impersonate Bruce.”  
“And you got buyer’s remorse when you found out it wasn’t the real thing?”  
“He was already dying,” you say.  
“So, what, now?”  
“I’m taking him to Jonathan Crane. Crane has agreed to embalm him.”  
“What are you going to do with it after that?”  
“I haven’t decided.” You have decided, but you don’t want to tell her. You didn’t tell her when you went back to the crypt and moved Jerome’s body to another location. You’re not going to tell her that Bruce is bound for the same place. It’s yours, and yours alone. You tell yourself that someone could get the information out of her. You’ve always hated other people touching your things.  
Yes. That’s it.  
“Tie him up,” she says, “I’ll carry him.”  
There’s no rope, so you bind the sheet around Bruce with belts and scarves. “I hope these match his shoes,” Ecco says as she negotiates the body, heaves him over her shoulder. She eases into a crouch, and then comes up with a great huff. You carry a bag with the clothes he wore when he was with you. She follows you down to the garage, and angles him into the back seat of the car. “He’s like a pair of skis,” she says, getting into the driver’s seat.  
At Crane’s home, you find Tetch in the living room, drinking a cup of tea. He puts it down, and stands when he sees Ecco.  
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Miss-”  
“Don’t talk to me,” she says to Tetch, then tells you that she’ll be waiting by the car.  
Tetch’s mouth pulls taut. “He’ll be right up,” Tetch says, and sits back down with his cup of tea.  
“How long has it been dead?” Crane asks when he appears.  
“Less than a day.”  
“Then, it’s still in rigor.”  
You know what the words mean, but you hesitate.  
“It’s still stiff,” Crane says.  
“He’s in the car. Ecco will bring him in.”  
Crane leads the two of you down to his lab. The dissection table is like the one in the anatomy lab of the medical school. Your university’s science department had a club-y atmosphere. Interdisciplinary fraternization was encouraged. “You never know where you’ll find talent,” your RA once told you, “There’s been more than one change in major.” But pre-med wasn’t for you. Looking at the colander-like perforations in the table’s surface, you feel yourself frown.  
“Do you need me here?” Ecco asks you.  
You shake your head, but walk with her back up through and out of the house. Tetch watches the two of you from his chair, his eyes huge and dark above his tea cup. It was the least you could do for her.  
“I’ll leave the car,” she says. Somehow, you know that she won’t be home when you return. That’s fine. You both need time to yourselves.  
“I waited for you,” Crane says when you go back down to the lab. He’s wearing rubber gloves, his arms bent, his hands folded. Bruce is still wrapped in his sheet, but Crane has undone the bindings.  
“That was considerate,” you say dryly.  
“You can unwrap him,” Crane says.  
When you have your hands full of belts, you think, for a moment, incongruously, of your mother. For a few years before you left, she was sometimes involved with Randy, the Reptile Wrangler. There wasn’t much to his act. He just handled snakes that he claimed were venomous, but you knew, because you and Jerome dutifully marked down a description of each one and looked it up in the encyclopedia, only seemed dangerous. When you read the accounts of her death, her profession was listed as “snake dancer”. What this actually entailed, you can’t imagine. Nor do you want to. You shove aside some things on one of the counters, and leave the belts there. It’s a slightly more athletic affair to shift the bedsheet away from Bruce. By the end, you’re breathing heavily. There are some spots of blood on it, as there are on your bed, still. You’ll have to strip the bed when you get home. The idea of balling up the sheet and tossing it to the side offends you, so you take the time to fold it neatly, pressing the folds between your fingers. You set it on top of the belts.  
You know what happens during an autopsy. Knowing and witnessing, though, are two different things. Death is dynamic. It has energy. It has moving parts. In a way, it’s like a machine. In causing a death, you’re acting upon a living body. Death is something that happens later, even by seconds; almost unconnected to you. It’s not something you did, but the body’s reaction to it. It’s like the body just becomes allergic to life. This, though, is not death. It’s quiet and still, and the body lying on the table only resembles a living body in the most superficial sense. Crane’s incisions are neat. You catch yourself appreciating them against your will. His manner is almost gentle- but, then, it would have to be. He’s a chemist, after all. All of that practice pipette-ing liquids drop by drop has to be worth something. In this case, too, the liquids hold great fascination for him. Before he did anything, he took blood, inserted a thin syringe into one of Bruce’s eyeballs, swabbed the inside of Bruce’s mouth. He had you help him turn Bruce onto his front so that he could remove some fluid from his spinal column. Crane held it up to the light. It looked like red wine.  
“In this respect, at least, there is no mystery,” Crane said. Did he sound sad? “Your friend died of a cerebral hemorrhage.”  
You had no reply.  
Bruce’s skull open, you find yourself, of all things, haggling.  
“I want the brain,” Crane says.  
“No.”  
“I’m going to dissect it, anyway. It’s just going to be put in a plastic bag with the rest of his organs. It’s no use to you. Or to him.”  
“No.”  
“The brain stem.”  
“No.”  
“A sample.”  
“How big?”  
Crane holds his fingers an inch apart.  
“No.”  
Behind his mask, Crane huffs. “Some slides.”  
You roll your eyes. “Fine.”  
“I take photos.”  
“Well, that’s all right.”  
Though, for all you know, Crane stuffs half of the brain into his pocket, because you don’t watch him work. It would be meaningless to you, anyway. You’re not an anatomist, let alone a neuroscientist. You can’t look at the ruins of Bruce’s cranium, so you look at his hands. You remember, now, that they shook when he held his fork at dinner. Of course, after the fact, it all makes sense. He certainly looked like death. He was a little dull. At times, his eyes seemed to lose focus. Everything is so obvious when you’re on the other side of it. It makes you feel so smart.  
After Crane has made his little slides, taken his little pictures, you hear him place the brain in a plastic bag. Now, you can look. The bag is an official-looking red; it even has the biohazard symbol on it. You wonder fleetingly if Crane isn’t working for Cobblepot, too. The things in the lab had to come from someplace. Did Crane have the smarts to walk into a hospital and take what he needed? You can’t imagine how he could. He’s so utterly ridiculous.  
Yet, when Crane has replaced the top of Bruce’s skull and stitched his scalp back together, it’s as though nothing had happened. You think of the trained animals in the circus. A poodle riding a tricycle, staring straight ahead with glittering eyes, no expression on its face, pedaling away in ever wider parabolas and circles.  
“The brain was like half-cooked cherry Jello,” says Crane.  
“What a way you have with words.”  
“What I mean is that the event was massive. It was as though the structures of the brain experienced catastrophic failure. It was tremendous,” Crane says, breathing out deeply.  
“One to write about in your diary.”  
Crane says nothing, but continues going about his business. He wants samples of bone marrow, and you grudgingly agree. You will not, however, let him take any of the bone, itself.  
“It would be nothing. The tip of his little finger.”  
You feel yourself frown.  
“A biopsy of muscle tissue.”  
“All right.”  
That, at least, shuts him up.  
“The rest seems to be unremarkable,” Crane says after he’s examined Bruce’s organs, “It tells us as much as you must already have known. He had been living on the street for some time, but the body was clean. He’d even recently had a haircut. He ate not long before death. There’s evidence of sexual activity.”  
“Are you finished?”  
“Yes. I’ll put him back together, and then start the embalming.”  
Crane puts Bruce’s organs in the red plastic bag, then tucks the bag into the abdominal cavity. The bones and muscles are put back in place, like curtains closing on a stage. Crane sews shut the incisions on Bruce’s torso, then his eyelids, then his mouth. It’s then a matter of preparing the machines that pump out blood and pump in embalming fluid, with their rubber tubes and long, thick needles. You were already familiar with this, as well. After Jerome’s death, you went to the library, and read the entry in the medical reference. It had been… satisfying.  
Do you still feel satisfied?  
“He’s going to be pale,” Crane says.  
“He’s dead.”  
“I mean that removing the blood will take the color out of his cheeks.”  
“I understand. I don’t care,” you add, for whatever Crane might be implying, or thinking of implying.  
“Good. I’ve never put make up on a corpse.”  
You want to tell Crane that he’s an ass. You’ll have to wait. He still has something you need. You watch him massage Bruce’s flesh, working one fluid in and another out.  
“What do you want to do with his blood?” Crane asks.  
“You can put it in your martini, as far as I’m concerned.”  
“I have my samples. I don’t need it.”  
You look at the tubes in Bruce’s arteries. You frown.  
“I’ll dispose of it,” Crane says. You look at the deep stainless steel sink in the corner of the room. You’re very tired.  
Afterwards, it’s just a few stitches in Bruce’s neck, arms, and thighs. Crane’s stitches remain neat. His hand never falters.  
“He’s all yours,” says Crane, pulling off the rubber gloves. You look at Bruce. He’s pale, and the black thread looks, when you glimpse it out of the corner of your eye, like writing on white paper. If it were writing, what do you think it would say? Otherwise, Bruce is unchanged. Some people never really change. You can do whatever you want to them, and they are always just the same as they’ve always been. You’re like this. You brush back Bruce’s hair from his forehead.  
“Help me dress him,” you say, but you have to say it nicely.  
Sounding amused: “All right.”  
As though this were not sufficiently farcical a picture, Bruce’s dead weight is too much for you and Crane to manage, so Crane has to call down Tetch, who pales, and retreats halfway up the stairs when he sees what he’s being asked to do.  
“He doesn’t have anything you haven’t seen before,” you tell Tetch when Crane has coaxed him back down, looking directly at Tetch against your better judgment for the pleasure of his seasick expression. Tetch frowns. He takes off his robe, and rolls up his sleeves. He’ll only touch Bruce wearing rubber gloves. You’ve heard the rumors about him and his sister, including the postmortem ones. You know where he’s been. Who does he think he’s fooling? You hate artifice, and you hate dissembling.  
But it’s the biggest lie of all when Bruce is dressed. A fantastic lie. For a cold, hard moment, you think that he looks alive. You’re seeing him now, but you’re also seeing him at home, yesterday morning, standing in your bedroom. This is the way he’ll look forever. There’s a pain that feels like something lodged in your flesh. It’s not a bullet or the tip of a knife. It’s not something alien. It’s a part of you that just grew. The pain is everything else that you were used to feeling moving aside. All of the old parts crash down around the new one like slabs of concrete laid flat.  
Without registering the process, you take Bruce from that house to the car. By the time you get where you’re going, a sea change has occurred, and when you take Bruce out of the car, he’s pliant in your arms. You have to drag him, like a drunken friend to the mausoleum. Where Jerome waits. Like Jerome did, Bruce slots into place. Not so much in their physical location, but somewhere inside of you. Maybe that was what the movement and pain were. Bruce and Jerome are complete, the way that things are when they’re done. Now, you’re that way, too.


	2. Evergreen

People are always saying that when they’re discovered, it’s a relief. The worst happened, all was found out, and you didn’t die. Now, you have nothing to hide. You may be punished, but even the punishment is a relief. You can let it cleanse you. It’ll purify you if you let it.  
When it was just a matter of being caught in a trivial lie, or having a minor infraction uncovered, that still made sense to you. Your mom or dad, your teacher, Alfred was angry, but the anger departed as quickly as it came. You were grounded, or got detention or extra homework, or you had to wash windows on a sunny Saturday afternoon, but you were really free. Spiritually, you were free.  
It doesn’t really work that way anymore, does it?  
You went home. Received a warm welcome. Alfred immediately understood that this was only a brief stay. Not a real homecoming. Still, he embraced you. Made you dinner. Ran you a bath. Turned down your bed. Waited until the next morning to tell you about Selina.  
Didn’t wonder why you hadn’t asked about her the second you’d walked through the front door.  
“It appears that she was checked out of hospital,” he said, somewhere between nonchalant and sheepish. The kind of shame that covers itself. Shame that has its own shame.  
“What?” you gasped. You cleared your throat. “How?”  
“That would seem to be a bit of a mystery. Those members of staff who could remember anything at all mentioned seeing a red-haired woman of some ambiguous description before it all went blank. The word that kept popping up, though, was ‘beautiful’.”  
“Ivy,” you sighed. “She won’t hurt Selina,” you said resolutely, “Ivy fixed her, before. She can do it again. Selina will be fine.”  
“Then, that would seem to be that,” Alfred said, and took away the breakfast dishes to wash.  
“I should probably get going,” you muttered.  
“I thought that she was safe as houses.”  
You were glad for the alibi. “It doesn’t hurt to be sure.”  
But you didn’t move. Not then, and not for a long time. You let yourself stay far longer than you meant to. You watched winter come. It felt as if the world were shutting off, receding, tucking itself away, giving you permission to linger. Yet, every second you were there, you felt like you were doing something wrong, something somehow unnatural or obscene. You thought about stories of travelers getting lost in strange lands, eating the food there and having to stay forever. Maybe that’s what home is: an illusion that becomes real because you let it comfort you. It comforts you the most when you least deserve comfort, and you love it for that. Your real life could seal up like a scab. You could stay forever in this warm, safe place, drinking hot cocoa by the fire at night with Alfred, getting up early to help him shovel snow and prune the ornamental shrubs. If you ever wanted to get back to reality, you’d have to make a cut. It would hurt. It would bleed.  
It did hurt. It did bleed. Alfred didn’t want to let you go. He did it, anyway.  
When you’re in Gotham again, you chase down rumors. Part of the city, around the park, is totally uninhabitable, even by current standards. No one dares go near it after dark. Sometimes, bodies appear, usually at the shore, which means that Ivy’s reach must extend to the river, or that she has multiple bases of operation. The bodies are congested with greenery, grotesquely bloated even for having been in the water, organs dry leather purses full of clover. No one can tell you more. Still, you’re sure that Selina is safe. Ivy wouldn’t take her away just to kill her, not when killing her in the hospital would have made the kind of big, splashy statement that Ivy seems to like, these days.  
You go back to the precinct. A few blocks around it almost look normal. The shops are full of people, if only to clean up and to salvage what they can. Lucius set up one of the generators at half-power, and it provides for the precinct and the surrounding area. He’s glad to see you. Everyone else half-heartedly tells you to go home. When you aren’t moved, they offer you a place to sleep. You’re happy to accept, more out of gratitude than genuine need. You don’t imagine that you’ll be sleeping very much.  
Every morning, you lie down in a bunk at the precinct, and you think you must sleep, but it’s a thin, dreamless sleep. When you wake up, your limbs feel like they’re tied on loosely, like a puppet’s limbs. It’s only at night, when you’re out there that you feel solid. You feel impenetrable. You almost pity anything that tries to crash against you. Every night, you go a little further away from the precinct. You’re almost disappointed to see how far civilization has reached. Reached out. Like a warm, grasping hand. Windows with lights behind them all the way up to the tops of the buildings, blocks and blocks away from the precinct. When you see a pair of dog-walkers, you almost gasp. They look at you, and you look at them. Your expression, you know, is one of bewilderment. Theirs, friendly surprise. You find yourself running from them. Only in bed, the next morning, do you feel any embarrassment.  
You’re thinking about going to the edge of the park, just to see if you can find any clues as to Ivy’s whereabouts, her plans, Selina’s state. Whatever Ivy’s built for herself may house other creatures. You’ve heard that a few escapees from Indian Hill were never captured, and hid throughout the city, biding their time. Sometimes, you think about your clone. It’s so weird that there’s someone out there with the same face as you. Does anyone ever think that it’s really you? Then, you start to think about Jerome and Jeremiah, so you make yourself stop. Instead, you run through your fights, remembering what you did right and what you did wrong. The entire left side of your torso looks like something from a butcher shop. A few nights ago, someone got you down on the ground, and you didn’t immediately get back up again. When you’re in bed in the morning, you can let yourself admit that you’d wanted to see what would happen. How much you could take. The experiment failed, panic making you act before the pain overwhelmed you. You’d gotten away, you’re not sure how.  
“I don’t think anything’s broken,” Lucius said, “but you should still see a doctor as soon as possible.”  
You assured him that you would.  
He gave you a couple of aspirin, apologizing for not having anything stronger.  
“I wouldn’t take it, anyway,” you said brightly.  
You took your aspirin, and lay in bed, thinking but not sleeping.  
The bruises don’t hurt all the time, not in the way we think of things hurting, not in an acute sense. The pain is always there, and in its constancy, you forget about it. It’s like your heartbeat.  
At the edge of the park, you clip off part of a creeper, and drop it into a plastic bag, for Lucius to examine. That it’s alive at all in the dead of winter is alone significant. When you turn around to look into the street, you see Jeremiah walking toward you. There should be fog, or mist, or at least real darkness, you think, irritably. The sky is clear, and the moon is out, so you see him perfectly well. You have not even the luxury of feigned surprise. You certainly can’t ignore him; all you can do is watch him as he approaches, taking his time. You can only wait until he gets to where he’s going. Until he’s good and ready.  
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Bruce,” Jeremiah says- but there’s something off about the way he says it. He always looks and sounds sort of sad, and whenever you think of him, you think of that song, Tears of A Clown that your mom and dad used to sometimes dance to at parties. Now, he looks like he really is sad, but also, happy.  
You’ve given up trying to understand him.  
“What are you doing here?” you snap, because you feel better when you’re at least pretending to be angry at him.  
“The same thing you are, I’d imagine.” He’s back to sounding bored. Sad, but annoyed at it. “I’m just going where the night takes me. I heard something about someone swooping around in a cape like something out of a fifty-cent matinée. You wouldn’t know about that, would you?”  
“Isn’t the city full of freaks, now?”  
“I think of it as more of an alchemical process. When you drain away everything superfluous, you’re left with the true essence of a thing. This is Gotham as it’s always been; it’s just truer to itself.”  
“No,” you say, and now, you’re actually angry, “that’s not what this place is.”  
“Such a temper. One would think I’d insulted your mother.”  
You don’t know what you’re thinking, because you don’t think. You hit him so hard that it turns his head, sort of spins him.  
“Remind me never to actually insult your mother,” Jeremiah says, rubbing his jaw.  
“What do you want?” You surprise yourself with how calm you sound. How did you make your voice do that?  
“I’ve missed you, Bruce.”  
Tears of a clown.  
You say nothing.  
“I think you’ve missed me, too.”  
You don’t say anything, which you realize immediately was a mistake, because he slips into your silence, through it, to you. His arms are around you. You think about the bullet wound to his shoulder. You wonder if it felt weird to him; not the wound itself, but what it meant. That being shot, during a fight with other criminals, and all of the things he’d done that had lead him to that event, meant that he had fully left behind his old life. You’ve since been through your father’s files. At night, when Alfred was asleep, or at least willing not to disturb you. For a long time, you found nothing, as good as nothing. There was the odd mention of Xander Wilde, which you’d expected, but nothing… real. Nothing to signal a connection, or the promise of one. It bothered you. You started to wonder if Jeremiah hadn’t chosen your name out of a hat, and your father chosen Wilde out of one, as well. Then, you remembered. You went down into your father’s secret room, where you’d seen the filing cabinets. Jeremiah was under ‘V’, not ‘W’. There were adoption records, change of name forms, a birth certificate, all bearing the stamp ‘official copy’. School transcripts. Letters of recommendation. A copy of a senior thesis in a gray binder, the corners frayed from wear. You thought of Karen Jennings. You wondered who else might be out there. You felt a strange sense of vertigo as you imagined one day tucking a file on Selina into the cabinet under ‘K’. It’s a good way to keep track of people. Like this, they’re manageable. Paper’s so cold, so reasonable.  
It’s not warm. It’s not hot. Is Jeremiah feverish? You don’t remember him feeling this hot, but it’s winter, now, and you’re suddenly aware of the cold air biting at your cheeks like the teeth of tiny vampire bats. So that his hand on your cheek fills you with relief all the way down to your toes. It’s like being drunk on a cold night. You forget about the cold. You forget about winter. You throw open your coat, and let the wind rush at you. You’re invulnerable. You’re a god. You’re going to live forever.  
You kiss him.  
“I have to stop doing this,” you say when you’re able. It’s like being in a dream, knowing that it’s a dream, but finding no power in your knowledge. You remain helpless. You must like it. If you’re caught, and the truth is finally known, it means that you have to stop. If doing something is bad for you, you’re supposed to be desperate to stop. When you’re forced to stop, you’re supposed to be grateful. But that’s over, now. You no longer want to be free. You’d rather spend your life running scared than have this end. The person you used to be is long gone, and you don’t even miss him.  
You don’t stop.


End file.
